Richard Spencer is one of the Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondents. Married with three children, he was previously news editor, and then China correspondent for six years. He is based in Cairo.

A Chinese adventure in Africa

Anyone who doubted that there is a new Great Game afoot, with China a player, should consider this article from an African news website.Â

Big players like PetroChina have invested in Africa

Out in the entertaining country of Somaliland – entertaining because it is unrecognised as a country by anyone, a throwback to a previous era of colonialism when it was British Somaliland, and apparently relatively decent as a place – a Chinese guy and a Yemeni were arrested doing something dodgy – it is not clear what – involving minerals.

Once upon a time, the Chinese had an (unfounded) reputation of being unadventurous. It was perhaps more truthful to say that many Chinese preferred adventure in groups to individual acts of exploration.Â I suspect that is changing now, and that Africa is where it is changing most.

Much of what is written about China's investments in Africa concentrates on the contracts put in place by big state-owned players like PetroChina or the mining companies.

But in fact, much of it is by private entrepreneurs and individuals who stay on after going there as labourers of one sort or another and open shops and restaurants so on, much as they have done all over the world.Â However, I think for an individual Chinese to team up with a Yemeni like this to go mineral hunting,Â presumably at the behest of some bigger company, is a dramatic twist: this is the sort of stuff of which boys' novels from 19th century Britain were made.

I hope we get to hear the full story behind this, and that the unnamed Chinese becomes some sort of hero, or at least anti-hero, back home.

I fear he may not: such colonialist adventure is now politically incorrect, so we may not get to hear too much about it.

Anyone wondering what the connection is between Yemen and Somaliland might want to read The Zanzibar Chest, by Aidan Hartley, a journalist who by chance happened to be at school with me though I haven't seen him for decades.

It is a memoir setting stories from his own life and that of his father in and around the horn of Africa – and in Yemen on the other side of it.

Yemen, like Somaliland, also once fell under the sway of the British colonialists, of course.